Austin Entrepreneur Dean Drako announced last week that he had acquired Fremont, Calif-based Cobalt AI.
Drako plans to serve as Cobalt AI’s chairman, while Ken Wolff, the company’s CEO, will continue leading it.
Cobalt is a leading provider of AI alarm filtering, remote monitoring, and security robot solutions for the enterprise. The Cobalt Monitoring Intelligence and the Cobalt Command Center deploy on various cameras, access control systems, robots, and other edge devices. Cobalt’s enterprise security automation technology combines AI with human verification to improve enterprise safety, security, and facility workflows while delivering predictability at greatly reduced costs.
Drako renamed the company from Cobalt Robotics to Cobalt AI, reflecting its AI leadership across multiple domains.
“We are thrilled that Dean Drako has acquired Cobalt and will serve as chairman. Dean has invested capital and strategic insights to grow other physical security companies to unicorns and technology leaders in their space,” Ken Wolff, CEO of Cobalt AI, said in a news release. “We share a mutual vision of the tremendous advantages of automation through AI with human verification. Drako’s acquisition validates our strategy to improve monitoring, response times and lower costs and also gives us the capital to deliver for our enterprise clients.”
“I searched for the company with the most powerful AI-based enterprise security automation in our physical security industry,” Drako said in a news release. “AI is transforming our industry, and Cobalt’s alarm filtering and other technologies are years ahead.”
“The company monitoring and command center technology is a catalyst for a new era of security,” Draco said in a news release. “They have created field-proven AI to make security and guarding tremendously more effective and efficient. Furthermore, Cobalt’s open platform strategy, which integrates with a plethora of video and access systems, is aligned with the open product strategy I believe in.”
Cobalt AI, founded in 2016, is the only company to automate repetitive manual security and facility tasks with an integrated service unifying state-of-the-art machine learning software, robotics, and expert human oversight.
Drako is a parallel entrepreneur, investor, and engineer. Drako is the founder and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks, delivering the industry’s leading AI-power cloud video surveillance system, and owner and chairman of Brivo, the industry leader in smart cloud access control systems. Previously, Drako was the founder, president and CEO of Barracuda Networks, where he developed the IT security industry’s first spam filter appliance. From Barracuda’s inception in 2003 through 2012, Drako grew the company into an IT security industry leader for mid-market businesses, with over $200 million in annual sales and 150,000 customers.
